“Can’t Mandy cure?!” Examining practices of cultural resistance within the Gypsy-Traveller community

Gypsy-Travellers have faced centuries of persecution, and yet previous engagement has largely focused on responses through frameworks of resilience rather than resistance. This paper extends this, alongside scholarship on resistance, by analysing how everyday Gypsy-Traveller practices coalesce to constitute non-intentional acts of cultural resistance. To capture this, I propose the concept cultural encroachments of the (extra)ordinary. This builds on Bayat’s (2013) notion of the quiet encroachment of the ordinary and embeds Feld’s (1996) acoustemology within Lefebvre’s (2004) rhythmanalysis to offer a more multidimensional and multisensory understanding of resistance, attending to visual, rhythmic, and sonic dimensions. It further contributes to ongoing discussions surrounding consciousness and intentionality within acts of resistance. Applying this to an analysis of the 2022 Appleby Horse Fair, I explore how non-political and non-intentional ordinary aspects of Gypsy-Traveller life coalesce into acts of cultural resistance.